Sunday morning we traveled to my folk's house to be in place for the total eclipse of the sun which would take place the following Monday morning. The Oregon Department of Transportation, the state police, and various news sites had been forecasting epoceclipse, with dire warnings that the event would turn into a combination Woodstock and hurricane Katrina. Millions were expected to descend upon Oregon like a plague of locusts, eat all the food, buy all the gas, and start a zillion forest fires.
We opted to drive the day before the eclipse. The traffic along 99W was fine, with the occasional, mandatory, slow farm truck. We had a lovely day with my folks and my sister's family. At 1:15PM I laid down some painter's tape (aligned with the meridian sun) on the deck to get a feel for the cardinal directions. My folks' house is on a north-east by south-west axis, which has more to do with the slope it's on than with any solar alignment. I double-checked it later that evening off of Polaris and it was close enough.
Monday morning, I woke up before sunrise and went out to see what could be seen. There are a lot of forest fires going on around the state, and Sunday had become hazier and hazier as the day progressed. Also, it's not unusual for the night to bring clouds in from the coast. The sky was dark blue, which progressed to a kind of purple and to orange on the eastern horizon. A bank of low haze hid the Cascade Mountains. I took a few pictures of Venus.
When the sun rose, it was much more north than I'd expected. I put down some more tape to mark where I thought the sun would be at 9 AM, set up a tripod and cameras, and made breakfast mimosas. The family gathered for bacon and eggs and panckakes, and then it was time for first contact.
The local amber alert system sent various messages to everyone's cell phones warning people to 1) pay attention to the road, not the eclipse, while driving; 2) to watch for falling rocks while climbing during the eclipse, and; 3) to not look at the sun without proper eye protection. In their driveway, the neighbors next door, laughed a lot, and we joked about throwing rocks at each other. We also bet that the next amber alert would be about fireballs and the end times.
Through eclipse glasses, the sun's disk showed a little nibble out of it. We tried various methods of projecting the crescent. The binoculars produced the largest, most study-able image, while a colander produced the most artistic image. I went back and forth on how much I liked looking through the eclipse glasses at the sun; at the beginning it was like looking at an eclipse of the moon, only more boring because the sun's disk is featureless and the moon has craters. Also, I hadn't practiced, so I didn't figure out how to take a picture of the sun with the eclipse glasses over my camera: so those shots were odd reflections between the Mylar and the lens.
When the moon had the sun about half-way covered, the quality of the light was odd. It was sunlight, but the intensity was down; in retrospect, I'd say it was like moonlight on a bright full moon night, except it was day. At the start of the eclipse, the morning promised to be hot -- and I'd been sweating on my folks deck. But now the sunlight shining on my arm didn't heat it at all.
We spotted two white objects. At first we thought one of them might have been Venus, but they turned out to be weather balloons. The kids were surprisingly nonplussed about the crescent sun, and roped Mark into a game of Monopoly. We did get them out as totality approached.
It got darker and colder.
Mark saw the shadow bands first: squiggly waves running up the wall behind us. Faster than a cloud's shadow, and more subtle, they broke the illusion that the house is a fixed object in space, and is actually a moving point on the celestial machine. On some level, we knew we were seeing the portents of the swift and massive dance of the heavens. The sundial motto, "Light is the Shadow of God" never felt more true at that moment.
Totality was upon us. Things happened in quick succession. The crescent sun became a fingernail, became a hairline, and winked out. We whipped off our glasses. I said, "Oh wow..."
A huge black disk hung in the middle of a white corona in a midnight blue sky. I stood in a circle of quiet; distantly, I heard the kids jumping up and down and shouting that this was the coolest thing ever, neighbors whooping, and fireworks going off. I snapped some photos.
"I think I see Mercury," I said, "at about eight o'clock." The corona stretched away from the disk in asymmetric loops, like long silvered hair given life by static electricity. There was a faint dot tangled in the corona, near the black disk--later I wondered if I was actually seeing Regulus. I said, "Oh wow..." again.
I fiddled with the video camera's zoom. Through the distance, I heard Mark and The Child making a quick video. I looked up again at the blue, black and white spectacle. A shadow of red tickled my eye. I wasn't sure if it was really there. Then a red pinprick appeared, like a small ruby set on a ring. "Oh wow... I'm seeing Bailey's Beads!" I said. The ruby grew to a coal. Brighter. "Glasses on!" someone said. Totality was over.
The moon's shadow raced away from the house, and the valley below brightened. I looked for shadow bands, but they weren't visible. The sky was still dark; it was still cold; and we all thought that was the shortest 90 seconds of our lives.
The sunlight grew stronger, but it wouldn't be another half hour or so before it would be able to warm my arms. The sun's crescent swelled. Already the memory of the corona faded to unreality -- something fantastic one might dream, something looming too huge and dominating to have been real.
I poured myself a second mimosa.
We gazed up at the growing sun, and tried to predict when the eclipse would end. The disk looked like a hat's bill; it looked like Ms. PacMan. It looked like a chipped plate. It had a bird peck out of it. Ten minutes past all of our predictions, it was an almost perfect circle. The disk shone, climbing in the sky, with a rough patch along one point, as if the moon had abraded it. It was perfect once more.